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Art of Life 🦋

@Art0fLife_

4 months ago

She literally explained why you feel tired all day and how to fix it:

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Aakash Gupta

@aakashgupta

6 months ago

That shark was already middle-aged when Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. The Greenland shark is the longest-lived vertebrate on Earth. Scientists aged them by carbon-dating proteins in their eye lenses, proteins that formed before they were born and never break down. The oldest specimen they found: 392 years old, give or take 120 years. That error bar alone is longer than most human lifetimes. The math on their biology is wild. They grow one centimeter per year. They don’t reach sexual maturity until they’re 150. Their gestation period is 8 to 18 years. A female might carry her young for nearly two decades before giving birth. They’re also almost entirely blind. A parasitic copepod called Ommatokoita elongata attaches to their corneas and eats away at the tissue. Nearly every Greenland shark alive has these creatures dangling from its eyes. Scientists used to think this made them sluggish scavengers. Then they started finding polar bears, reindeer, horses, and seals in their stomachs. One shark had an entire reindeer inside, antlers intact. How does a blind, slow-moving animal catch mammals? Nobody fully understands. The leading theory: they ambush sleeping seals in total darkness at 2,000 meters depth, navigating by smell and electroreception alone. The reason this matters: scientists just sequenced the Greenland shark genome in 2024 and found extra copies of genes involved in DNA repair and tumor suppression. The sharks carry a mutated version of TP53, the “guardian of the genome” gene. They have multiple copies of genes linked to immune function that other sharks don’t have. Something in their biology has solved the cancer problem that kills nearly everything else. They live four centuries while maintaining functional eyes that parasites are actively destroying. That 400-year-old shark swimming under the Arctic ice right now was born before the scientific revolution. It predates calculus, the microscope, and the theory of gravity. It’s been alive through every single war, plague, revolution, and technological shift in modern human history. And it might still have another century to go.

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